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Our old Cuisinart had finally started to fall apart and I found myself feeling melancholy when I put it out with our garage sale stuff. It was a heavy beast, and only now did I appreciate its weight. The new one we’d bought looked sturdy in its stainless steel skin but was as light as a feather in comparison, and as loud as a jackhammer. It felt like this new one was built to last 2 years to the 20-plus year’s we’d had the old one. I rubbed the old machine’s white porcelain-like exterior and said goodbye.

How many cheese soufflés had this thing helped us make? Cheese pizza toppings? Cheese for French onion soup? Okay so it grated a lot of cheese, among other things.

It also helped us save a cat. One of our cats was throwing up his hard food and losing weight fast. He even turned up his nose at the fancy soft food we tried to give him from the pet store, which was usually a treat.

One night while helping Alex prepare chicken nachos (and grating cheese, of course) Alex and I noticed our now skinny cat looking up at the counter where the rotisserie chicken sat. Even in his state he couldn’t help but be enticed by the smell. I reached for a piece to offer him, but Alex knew better. The chunks of chicken would probably just make him puke again, she told me as she eyed the Cuisinart. She had a better idea.

Even though we had freshly opened Coronas with lime wedges just waiting to drop in, Alex went into immediate care-giver mode. “Take what you want for the nachos, and whatever’s left pull off the chicken,” Alex ordered as she boiled a giant pot of water. “The carcass goes in here,” she said. A flurry of activity followed with some simmering time in between and the whole concoction finally mixed up in the Cuisinart.

Our cat lapped it up like it was gourmet food, and our old Cuisinart was the key in creating this life-saving baby-food-like concoction we called Chicken Slop.